Queer art

Art after Stonewall, 1969-1989

March 16, 2020March 16, 2020

Press release

The exhibition is on view at Columbus Museum of Art, USA, March 6, 2020 – May 31, 2020. [NB. Due to public health concerns CMA are temporarily closing for 3 weeks starting March 15, 2020.]

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots of 1969, this long-awaited and groundbreaking survey features more than 200 works of art and related visual materials that explore the profound impact of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBTQ) Civil-Rights movement on the art world. It presents a diverse group of artists and activists who lived and worked at the intersections of avant-garde art worlds, radical political movements, and profound social change. The exhibition focuses on both the work of openly LGBTQ artists as well as the practices of artists in terms of their engagement with newly emerging queer subcultures. Art after Stonewall, 1969-1989 highlights a wide array of conceptual, performance, film, and video art, as well as photography, painting, sculpture, music, along with historical documents and images taken from magazines, newspapers and television.

Art after Stonewall, 1969-1989 is organized by the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. The exhibition is curated by artist and art historian Jonathan Weinberg, currently a critic at the Yale School of Art, in concert with Tyler Cann, CMA’s Head of Exhibitions and Pizzuti Family Curator of Contemporary Art, and Drew Sawyer, the Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum (formerly William J. & Sarah Ross Soter Associate Curator of Photography at CMA).

The exhibition opened in New York City at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University (April 24 – July 20, 2019) and Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (April 24 – July 21, 2019), before being presented at The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami, Florida (September 14, 2019-January 6, 2020), and the Columbus Museum of Art (March 6-May 31, 2020).

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated 300-page catalogue with essays by more than 20 established and emerging scholars as well as entries by artists, including Andrew Durbin, Harmony Hammond, Lyle Ashton-Harris, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Richard Meyer, Flavia Rando, Alpesh Patel, Christopher Reed, Chris Vargas, and Margaret Vendryes.